Powerful new obesity drug poised to upend weight loss care
apnews.com
apnews.com
My doctor recently put me on tirzepatide. It needed a prior auth from my insurance despite me being under treatment for type 2 diabetes for the last five years. My pharmacy benefits plan requires all prescriptions be sent to a mail order pharmacy, so I asked him to send in there. The mail order pharmacy accepted the script and offered to fill it for $3,000 for a one month supply. I asked them why, and they said that prior auth was still pending. Two days later, prior auth was denied with no reason given when I called.
Two days after that, prior auth was approved and the mail order pharmacy now wanted to charge me $25 for a three month supply.
Access to this drug for most people will be a nightmare, even for those that could benefit from its on-label use for type 2 diabetes.
These obesity drugs are far more expensive though, sheesh.
On social media there seem to be two types of deniers:
1. People who make stuff up about it. Even Peter Attia said in an interview recently that you lose more lean mass than fat on the drug.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8089287/ "Greater weight loss was associated with greater improvement in body composition (lean body mass:fat mass ratio)."
2. People who think it's an unfair shortcut to lose weight with a pill. That fatties should just have to exist until they can make the identity level genetic changes on their own to lose it.
Both cases are sad to see especially if you've been someone who has- or watched a loved one- struggle to lose weight their whole life.
My partner got gastric sleeve surgery, and she got an inordinate amount of shit about how it was "cheating" to lose weight from some of her fatter friends as well as a bunch of her skinny friends. It's weird like that.
Or just eat less and exercise more..
What happens when they come off of this drug? Does the weight just go back on again?
Underlying lifestyle changes are the proper way to lose weight and keep it off. The sort of lifestyle changes that most non-fat people have been making all of their lives. That's why many people criticise shortcuts like this. It's a lazy solution to (mostly) laziness.
We're all dealt the exact same hand of psychological cards to work with?
Introducing a drug like this with no lifestyle changes will just lead to eat, inject, repeat.
Try permanently changing the color of your skin.
Or changing your gender so that you can have children.
Also, look up epigenetics.
Are you typing all this through a time vortex from 1980?
Are you capable of posting anything without being rude?
Until then, it's clear that you have no useful experience on the subject.
Introducing the likening of weight loss, something that everybody is capable of, to changing skin colour and changing your gender/sex is absurd.
Eating below your energy expenditure will cause you to lose weight. Every time somebody decides to eat a (or many) burger or a donut, they have the choice not to do that. Genetics aren't forcing anyone.
That's quite the straw man. The actual position is "while there's a shortage of these drugs, people who merely want them as a substitute for self-control should have to wait in line behind everyone who actually needs them for what they're meant to treat".
Now they are lazy and keeping drugs from people who are lazier thus more advanced along the type-2 diabetes escalation.
That's supposed to be a steelman of the position I listed?
Is 34 pounds over 17 months really that significant? I lost that much in 6 months on a ketogenic diet, even with a lot of cheating (alcohol, fried chicken).